The Wayback Machine

Despite its name, the Wayback Machine is not a time travel machine from a science fiction movie or from a television cartoon. Instead, it is an archive of Internet pages.

Would you like to look at a Web page as it existed several years ago? Perhaps you want to look for information that was available on the Web at one time but has since disappeared. The Wayback Machine may be the tool you need. Now you can surf the Web as it was.

The Internet Archive, working with Alexa Internet, has created the Wayback Machine. This free service makes it possible to surf pages stored in the Internet Archive's web archive.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress. (A petabyte is one million gigabytes or one billion megabytes.) The Wayback Machine is the largest such database in the world, containing multiple copies of the entire publicly available web, even bigger than Google's huge database. Google typically stores one copy of each web site whereas the Wayback Machine stores multiple copies. The Wayback Machine presently stores 85 billion web pages. That is one huge disk farm!

The Wayback Machine only collects publicly accessible Web pages. You will not find web pages that require a password to access, pages tagged for "robot exclusion" by their owners, pages that are only accessible when a person types into and sends a form, or pages on secure servers. You typically will not find pages created within the past six months but older pages are available, usually back to 1996.

I used the Wayback Machine this week to look at some Web pages that I have been maintaining for years, some of which are not connected with genealogy. It was interesting to look at some of my older HTML work. I also looked at some of today's more popular genealogy Web sites. I must say that Ancestry.com has come a long way from their home page of October 28, 1996! See http://web.archive.org/web/19961028055925/http://www.ancestry.com/.

The Wayback Machine stores all the text of standard HTML pages. Graphic images may or may not be stored. Fancier Web pages, using XML or Javascript, probably will not be found In the Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine is an excellent tool for finding information that "I saw it once on a web site." You can search sites for information posted years ago and perhaps no longer available today. It an also be a source of amusement as you see "how far we have come." Check out your site or your society's site from years ago!

You can search the 2 petabyte Web archive on The Wayback Machine at: http://www.archive.org/

Comments

[Happy Dae]

Hmmmm, I tried our web page and it didn't have anything. It's over 6 months--over a year, really. Guess we're still the young kids on the block.

Happy Dae.
http://www.ShoeStringGenealogy.com/ssg1.htm

[Reba E Shepard]

I teach an Adult Education Class at the local High School and found the WAYBACK MACHINE most interesting. I printed it off to share with students. Thank you.

[Jinny Collins]

Thanks for the news about Archives! I found my old web page, and my picture! I thought that
it was gone forever... pleasant memories. And, I've sent it to my grandkids. Great to know that
it's stored somewhere - forever?

[Dallan Quass]

If you want your site to appear in the Wayback Machine, you can submit it to http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters#crawl_site

Archive.org has more than just web pages, by the way. For example, I just searched the out-of-copyright texts that they've digitized (http://www.archive.org/details/texts) for the keyword genealogy and got 358 results.

-dallan

[Happy Dae]

Many thanks, Dallan. I shall do just that. (Gosh, to be a part of history!)

Happy Dae.
http://www.ShoeStringGenealogy.com/ssg1.htm